July 2004

Two years ago, Young's brewery began producing bottles of Kew Brew, a beer made from rare hops grown in London's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. And preserving endangered landscapes by turning them into alcoholic beverages sounds like a good idea to me...

"Sales [of the beer] will help Kew’s conservation work as a donation per bottle is given to the Gardens which runs the international Millennium Seed Bank Project."Not everyone likes the taste, of course, but the beer is, at the very least, an amazing idea; from the perspective of landscape design and preservationist horticulture, it's even brilliant. Avant-gardeners will soon forget all about topiary mazes – and install huge vats of beer instead. Liquid gardens you internalize. Indeed, one wonders what other plants could be rescued from the brink of extinction simply for the purpose of becoming beer: extinct ferns, perhaps, cloned from scraps of DNA, are fermented in bottles of Jurassic Park Pale Ale... Rare African orchids, saved from planetary disappearance, aromatically flavor BLDGBLOG's new Lost Eden Stout. Hybridized roses suddenly explode in genetic vitality due to the appearance of Pruned's Meta-Botanical Bitter.Next up: architectural historians join in. Condemned Futurist masterpieces are ground up and served as salt at French dinner parties. You may not save the building – but you can season your shrimp with it... Stuff sausages with Philip Johnson. The Building Burger.Ionic Pie.

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BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.